OSA Lecture by Dr. Jason Nordhaus

Jason Nordhaus is an Assistant Professor of Physics at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf at RIT, a core-faculty member in the Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation and a professor in the Astrophysics Ph.D. program in the School of Physics and Astronomy. Previously, he was a National Science Foundation Astronomy and Astrophysics Fellow and a Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Rochester in 2008.

Talk Title:

A status update on the neutrino mechanism of core-collapse supernovae

Abstract:

For approximately half a century, core-collapse supernovae have posed a vexing puzzle for theorists despite being a major ingredient (and uncertainty) in fields ranging from stellar and galaxy evolution to the interstellar medium. Historically, advances in core-collapse theory have been linked to advances in computing power and software. Supernovae are inherently multi-dimensional objects in which neutrino transport, gravity, hydrodynamic instabilities and convection play important roles. Three-dimensional simulations incorporating sufficient physical fidelity require extensive high-performance computing resources and codes efficient enough to use the associated architecture. Despite the availability of such infrastructure, no numerical simulation to-date has produced a canonical 10^51 erg supernova. In this talk, I will provide an overview of the neutrino mechanism, summarize recent simulations, and discuss an upper limit for the explosion energies obtainable via neutrino-matter interactions.